See Ya Later Verizon

Last month I moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn. The building is brand new and made up of mostly condominiums. The day after moving in, my girlfriend called Verizon to schedule an appointment. She was told that we'd have to pay for a jack installation for each room we wanted service, something like $65 for each jack, plus activation charges. She wanted a land-line phone because she feels more secure in having a way to contact her family on Long Island should NYC experience another event like September 11 or the Great Blackout of 2003, so she was willing to pay the fees. A week later, Verizon failed to show up, so she called them again and scheduled another appointment. The following week, they showed up on the wrong day when nobody was home to gve them access to the building. By this point, she was sick and tired of Verizon's scheduling problems so she called AT&T to schedule service through them, only to find out that they wanted us to pay the $300+ to install a network interface for the entire building. After nearly an hour on the phone with their customer service, she got them to waive the costs of installing a phone interface for the building and scheduled an appointment. The customer representative let it slip that Verizon would be doing the installation. That was the last straw, so we cancelled the service and in less than 5 minutes I had us subscribed to Vonage, one of the largest VOIP-based phone services. I submitted the order last Friday and yesterday the equipment arrived in the mail. In short order I had it installed and working on the LAN (using broadband Internet service from Time-Warner's Roadrunner). For $24.99/month, we get unlimited local and long-distance calls, something that would cost nearly twice as much through Verizon or AT&T. The service so far has been flawless and very easy to set up. So, goodbye Verizon you bloated, bureacratic, piece-of-shit monopoly. When customers have a choice, they will go elsewhere and avoid your overpriced, inept, shitty service. Serves you right.

P.S. If you want to susbcribe to Vonage, drop me an email and I'll put you through their neat referral system which gives you the first month of service for free.